Japanese Dumpling Recipes Archives

Mochi Covered Dark Chocolate Truffles a la Betelnut

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If you love dumplings and chocolate, this recipe is for you. Chefs Alexander Ong and Michael Siegel of Betelnut restaurant invited me for a lesson on how to make Siegel’s tasty creation, a mochi (sticky rice) wrapped dumpling that contains a filling of chocolate ganache. When I arrived at the San Francisco restaurant, Siegel was ready with all of his mis en place. We joked as he whisked, steamed, cut, and wrapped the dumplings. Siegel made it look so easy that for the first time, I felt like I could master Japanese wagashi-style confections and teach others too as well.

I had invited my dear friend Carolyn Jung of Foodgal.com to join us that afternoon, but I hadn’t fully explained what Siegel’s mochi dumpling was about. Carolyn had to squeeze our get together into her schedule, and when she arrived at Betelnut and discovered that the dumplings contained chocolate, she nearly exploded with glee.

“You didn’t tell me that he put CHOCOLATE into them!” she said. Oh. I told her they were truffle dumplings but the dumpling part got more to me and I overlooked the chocolate attraction to her!

When Carolyn tasted Siegel’s trio of mochi dumplings, she could barely contain herself to share them with the rest of us. I turned away for a few moments and when I returned my gaze to the mochi plate, it was empty.

How to Put a Crisp Skirt on Pot Stickers

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It’s hard to believe that it just over a week ago that I came back from Australia obsessed with figuring out how to replicate a particular style of pot stickers that I enjoyed at Hutong dumpling restaurant in Melbourne. As I noted, Hutong’s pot stickers were united on their plate by what could only be described as a crisp skirt. I asked for help to answer this question — How to produce that little skirt at home? A number of people came to my immediate rescue.

Robyn Laing from New Zealand translated a gyoza recipe from Gyoza no Daigasshou (Gyoza Grand Chorus) cookbook, scanned in the pages from the book, then sent the pdfs to me. I’d asked about the origin of the skirt and Robyn noted that the skirt recipe in the cookbook came from Chef Yagi:

Chef Yagi was born in China where his parents ran a restaurant. He stayed in China after the war but returned to Japan in 1979. To learn Japanese he invited friends over and made gyoza for them the way he’d had them in China. He went to cooking school and worked in a number of Chinese restaurants to learn the trade. This led to him starting a small restaurant and gradually expanded his business. It suggests that he came up with the idea of the skirt as a way differentiating his gyoza. So no way of telling whether this was an idea he adapted from China or from Japan.

Japanese Octopus Dumpling Balls Recipe (Takoyaki)

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Let me just say this upfront: Many dumplings are spherical in shape and can only be described as balls. Go ahead and giggle like I did during the four-day Asian Dumplings photo shoot when photographer Penny De Los Santos repeatedly said “balls” to break up the tension. But seriously, round shaped dumplings have a large presence in the Asian dumpling repertoire. Consider classic Asian dumplings such as fried Chinese sesame balls (jin duei) and Indian gulab jamum (once referred to in a recipe as cakey balls). I’ll stop with the innuendos.

What got me hooked on making Japanese takoyaki is not their shape, nor the fact that their name literally means octopus balls, reflecting that they are traditionally filled with chunks of cooked octopus. Takoyaki resemble French profiteroles but they combine an unusual array of savory ingredients – dashi stock hydrates the wheat flour batter, the filling includes raw, cooked, and pickled items, and garnishes comprise mayonnaise, seaweed, shaved bonito flakes and tonkatsu sauce, which tastes like Worcestershire sauce. All of these seemingly disparate ingredients give donut-like takoyaki a savory, rich, tangy, sea-like taste. These dumplings remind me of Japan’s quirky culture and its penchant for building layer upon layer of subtlety to create wonderful foods.